Kathleen Schaub has made a career of helping companies drive revenue, most prominently in executive roles at companies such as Sybase, Cadence, and Vanstar (formerly ComputerLand.) Now as founder and principal consultant at TrellisOne Consulting , she helps B2B companies transform marketing practices, aligning them with business objectives in order to improve sales performance. Fewer companies, however, can claim to have adapted their sales process as readily. HS) What’s different about the B2B selling process compared to say, 5 or 10 years ago? Fast forward to today. MORE >>

Dimensional mail in particular can help you break through the clutter, especially when targeting top executives. Pop Quiz! Direct Mail is: a) more expensive than email. b) quaintly old-fashioned. c) regaining popularity in B2B circles. d) often overlooked as an effective way to reach customers and prospects. Answer: (e) all of the above. Yet many B2B marketers continue to be allergic to the idea of using direct mail, simply because it seems such a throwback in our mobile-social-online era. Here are 5 areas that make ideal candidates for including direct mail in the marketing mix: 1. MORE >>

For one, I can report that no companies are coming to our firm asking us to help them align sales and marketing. Adding a campaign-specific unsubscribe link to outbound emails can help avoid eliminating names from the opt-in pool together. Creating a content map that categorizes your content by buying stage and buying persona can help identify gaps in your content portfolio. Earlier this week, Marketo , the marketing automation company, held its second ever user conference in San Francisco. It’s all heady stuff. m just not sure the rest of us are quite there yet. Email? MORE >>

tip: pose questions in a manner that implies the answer is a benefit to the reader, for example: “Help us send you more relevant information by identifying your primary areas of interest from the list below.”. Relevancy is one of the key factors in generating a consistent response from your lead nurturing emails: the more relevant your message to the reader’s job function, industry, interests, and stage in the selling cycle, the more likely he/she will be to respond. Take advantage of it. Here are 5 ways to consider segmenting your campaign: 1. Lead source. Job function. Industry. MORE >>

His logic (presumably): if a technology provider is promising to help improve our marketing effectiveness, shouldn’t their own marketing reflect those same high standards? A client confessed recently that one of the reasons his company had selected Marketo as a marketing automation provider was because he was so impressed by their marketing. Tangentially, I’d argue that more companies should select marketing agencies by the same criteria.). Quite apart from the merits of their technology, Marketo does indeed have a reputation for (to borrow a time-worn phrase): eating their own dog food. MORE >>